Editorial – Oct/Nov 2014 Investigate

Who would have thought, when serial ambusher Nicky Hager dumped his Dirty Politics book into the middle of an election campaign, what the results would be. Sure, Nicky and his publisher earned a cool half a million dollars in sales, but Nicky didn’t do it with the expectation of returning John Key to power with an even bigger majority.

Ironically, he should have seen it coming. His own book, early on, warns that dirty politics usually favours the right because it motivates the right to vote. How right he was.

Enter Sergeant Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom, with what John Key called his “sound and light show” the Monday before the election. There were indeed moments of light. Special guests Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald illuminated some of the secret surveillance that New Zealand is involved in.

Sure, John Key denied the GCSB were spying on New Zealanders, but he couldn’t rule out that the Americans were not conducting mass surveillance of New Zealanders.

I first spilt the beans on this back in 1995, in my first book, The Paradise Conspiracy (which, ironically, Nicky Hager cited as one of his inspirations for writing his first book Secret Power), and followed it up in much more detail in Totalitaria.

The spy agencies have a deal where they get around domestic anti-surveillance laws by spying on each other’s citizens. In that way, John Key can say hand on heart the GCSB doesn’t do mass surveillance on Kiwis. It doesn’t, the Americans do. The GCSB spies on people overseas in terms of its Five Eyes responsibilities.

Nevertheless, the interesting parts of Snowden’s revelations were overshadowed by the spectre of Kim Dotcom giggling like a fraulein and failing to nail John Key as promised.

If you thought this election was all about manipulating the public, take a look inside this issue at how our kids are being manipulated. Forget dirty politics, get agitated by dirty education tricks.

We send our kids to learn how to read, write and count. Instead they come back home wearing Al Gore ‘save the bears’ badges and chanting Buddhist mind control mantras.

How has it come to this?

John Ansell’s Treatygate website recently attained a stunning scoop with an essay from a high school teacher forced to leave New Zealand to find an honest job. He was staggered at how mythology about the Treaty and our past is being forced into the heads of teacher trainees so they regurgitate it to your children in class, even though it is patently wrong.

You can’t get a job as a teacher anymore, he says, without swearing allegiance to the Big Lie.

2 Comments

Nope…never has been, never will be, which is why I didn’t feature in it. Our companies and their publications are funded entirely by sales to customers, subscriptions and ordinary commercial advertisers like fragrance brands and consumer electronics brands.

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